God's Country: The Trail to Happiness

By JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD Author of The Valley of Silent Men The River’s End, etc.
NEW YORK Cosmopolitan Book Corporation MCMXXI
Copyright, 1921, by Cosmopolitan Book Corporation
All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
The Quinn & Boden Company BOOK MANUFACTURERS RAHWAY NEW JERSEY

The First Trail MY SECRET OF HAPPINESS

To-night I am in a little cabin in the heart of a great wilderness. Outside it is dark. I can hear the wind sighing in the thick spruce tops. I hear the laughter of a stream out of which I took my supper of trout. The People of the Night are awake, for a little while ago I heard a wolf howl, and, not far away, in an old stub, lives an owl that hoots at the light in my window. I think it’s going to storm. There is a heaviness in the air, and, in the drowse of it, the sweetness of distant rain.
I am strangely contented as I start the writing of this strangest of all the things I have written. I had never thought to give voice to the things that I am about to put on paper; yet have I dreamed that every soul in the world might know of them. But the task has seemed too great for me, and I have kept them within myself, expecting them to live and die there.
I am contented on this black night, with its promise of storm, for many reasons—though I am in the heart of a peopleless forest fifteen hundred miles from my city home. In the first place, I have built, with my own hands, this cabin that shelters me. My palms are still blistered by the helve of the ax. I am the architect of the fireplace of stone and mud in which a small fire burns for cheer, though it is late spring, with summer in the breath of the forests. I have made the chair in which I sit and the table on which I write, and the builder of a marble palace could take no greater pleasure in his achievement than have I.